The Odessa File

by Forsyth, Frederick

  ‘I collect the stamps,’ he said. ‘So I don’t like to damage the envelope.’

  He worked away for a few more minutes.

  ‘I read the diary last night at home. Remarkable document.’

  ‘Were you surprised?’ asked Miller.

  ‘Surprised? No, not by the contents. We all went through much the same sort of thing. With variations, of course. But so precise. Tauber would have made a perfect witness. He noticed everything, even the small details. And noted them – at the time. That is very important to get a conviction before German or Austrian courts. And now he’s dead.’

  Miller considered for a while. He looked up.

  ‘Herr Wiesenthal, so far as I know you’re the first Jew I have ever really had a long talk with who went through all that. One thing Tauber said in his diary surprised me – he said there was no such thing as collective guilt. But we Germans have been told for twenty years that we are all guilty. Do you believe that?’

  ‘No,’ said the Nazi-hunter flatly. ‘Tauber was right.’

  ‘How can you say that if we killed millions of people?’

  ‘Because you, personally, were not there. You did not kill anyone. As Tauber said, the tragedy is that the specific murderers have not been brought to justice.’

  ‘Then who,’ asked Miller, ‘really did kill those people?’

  Simon Wiesenthal regarded him intently.

  ‘Do you know about the various branches of the SS? About the sections within the SS who really were responsible for killing those millions?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then, I’d better tell you. You’ve heard about the Reich Economic Administration Main Office, charged with exploiting the victims before they died?’

  ‘Yes, I read something about it.’

  ‘Their job was in a sense the middle section of the operation,’ said Herr Wiesenthal.

  ‘That left the business of identifying the victims among the rest of the population, rounding them up, transporting them and, when the economic exploitation was over, finishing them off.

  ‘This was the task of the RSHA, the Reich Security Main Office, which actually killed the millions already mentioned. The rather odd use of the word “Security” in the title of this office stems from the quaint Nazi idea that the victims posed a threat to the Reich, which had to be made secure against them. Also in the functions of the RSHA were the tasks of rounding up, interrogating and incarcerating in concentration camps other enemies of the Reich like Communists, Social Democrats, Liberals, Quakers, reporters and priests who spoke out too inconveniently, resistance fighters in the occupied countries, and later army officers like Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, both murdered for suspicion of harbouring anti-Hitler sentiments.

  ‘The RSHA was divided into six departments, each called an Amt. Amt One was for administration and personnel; Amt Two was equipment and finance. Amt Three was the dreaded Security Services and Security Police, headed by Reinhard Heyrich, assassinated in Prague in 1942, and later by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, executed by the Allies. Theirs were the teams who devised the tortures used to make suspects talk, both inside Germany and in the occupied countries.

  ‘Amt Four was the Gestapo, headed by Heinrich Müller (still missing) and whose Jewish section, department B.4, was headed by Adolf Eichmann, executed by the Israelis in Jerusalem after being kidnapped from Argentina. Amt Five was the Criminal Police and Amt Six the Foreign Intelligence Service.

  ‘The two successive heads of Amt Three, Heydrich and Kaltenbrunner, were also the overall chiefs of the whole RSHA, and throughout the reigns of both men the head of Amt One was their deputy. He is a three-star general of the SS Bruno Streckenbach, who today has a well-paid job with a department store in Hamburg and lives in Vogelweide.

  ‘If one is going to specify guilt, therefore, most of it rests on these two departments of the SS, and the numbers involved are thousands, not the millions who make up contemporary Germany. The theory of the collective guilt of sixty million Germans, including millions of small children, women, old-age pensioners, soldiers, sailors and airmen, who had nothing to do with the holocaust, was originally conceived by the Allies, but has since suited the former members of the SS extremely well. The theory is the best ally they have, for they realise, as few Germans seem to do, that so long as the collective guilt theory remains unquestioned nobody will start to look for specific murderers; at least, not look hard enough. The specific murderers of the SS therefore hide even today behind the collective guilt theory.’

  Miller digested what he had been told. Somehow the very size of the figures involved baffled him. It was not possible to consider fourteen million people as each and every one an individual. It was easier to think of one man, dead on a stretcher under the rain in a Hamburg street.

  ‘The reason Tauber apparently had for killing himself,’ Miller asked, ‘do you believe it?’

  Herr Wiesenthal studied a beautiful pair of African stamps on one of the envelopes.

  ‘I believe he was right in thinking no one would believe him, that he saw Roschmann on the steps of the Opera. If that’s what he believed then he was right.’

  ‘But he didn’t even go to the police,’ said Miller.

  Simon Wiesenthal snipped the edge off another envelope and scanned the letter inside. After a pause he replied.

  ‘No. Technically he should have done. I don’t think it would have done any good. Not in Hamburg at any rate.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Hamburg?’

  ‘You went to the State Attorney General’s office there?’ asked Wiesenthal mildly.

  ‘Yes, I did. They weren’t terribly helpful.’

  Wiesenthal looked up.

  ‘I’m afraid the Attorney General’s department in Hamburg has a certain reputation in this office,’ he said. ‘Take, for example, the man mentioned in Tauber’s diary and by me just now, Gestapo chief and SS-General Bruno Streckenbach. Remember the name?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Miller. ‘What about him?’

  For answer Simon Wiesenthal riffled through a pile of papers on his desk, abstracted one and gazed at it.

  ‘Here he is,’ he said. ‘Known to West German justice as Document 141 JS 747/61. Want to hear about him?’

  ‘I have time,’ said Miller.

  ‘Right. Here goes. Before the war Gestapo chief in Hamburg. Climbed rapidly from then on to a top position in the SD and SP, the Security Service and Security Police sections of the RSHA. In 1939 he recruited extermination squads in Nazi-occupied Poland. At the end of 1940 he was head of the SD and SP sections of the SS for the whole of Poland, the so-called General Government, sitting in Cracow. Thousands were exterminated by SD and SP units in Poland during that period, mainly through Operation AB.

  ‘At the start of 1941 he came back to Berlin, promoted to Chief of Personnel for the SD. That was Amt Three of the RSHA. His chief was Reinhard Heydrich, and he became his deputy. Just before the invasion of Russia he helped to organise the extermination squads that went in behind the Army. As head of staffing he picked the personnel himself, for they were all from the SD branch.

  ‘Then he was promoted again, this time to head of personnel for the entire six branches of the RSHA and remained deputy chief of the RSHA under first Heydrich, who was killed by Czech partisans in Prague in 1942 – that was the killing that led to the reprisal at Lidice – and then deputy to Ernst Kaltenbrunner. As such he had all-embracing responsibility for the choice of personnel of the roving extermination squads and the fixed SD units throughout the Nazi-occupied eastern territories until the end of the war.’

  ‘So where is he now?’ asked Miller.

  ‘Walking around Hamburg, free as air,’ said Wiesenthal.

  Miller looked stunned.

  ‘They haven’t arrested him?’ he asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The police of Hamburg, of course.’

  For answer Simon Wiesenthal asked his secretary to bring him the bulging
file labelled ‘Justice – Hamburg’, from which he extracted a sheet of paper. He folded it neatly down the centre from top to bottom, and laid it in front of Miller so that only the left side of the sheet was facing upwards.

  ‘Do you recognise those names?’ he asked.

  Miller scanned the list of ten names with a frown.

  ‘Of course. I’ve been a police reporter in Hamburg for years. These are all senior police officers of the Hamburg force. Why?’

  ‘Spread the paper out,’ said Wiesenthal.

  Miller did so. Fully expanded, the sheet read:

  Miller looked up.

  ‘Christ!’ he said.

  ‘Now, do you begin to understand why a lieutenant-general of the SS is walking around Hamburg today?’

  Miller looked at the list in disbelief.

  ‘That must have been what Brandt meant about the inquiries into the former SS not being very popular in the Hamburg police.’

  ‘Probably,’ said Wiesenthal. ‘Nor is the Attorney General’s office the most energetic in Germany. There’s one lawyer on the staff at least who is keen, but certain interested parties have tried to have him dismissed several times.’

  The pretty secretary poked her head round the door.

  ‘Tea or coffee?’ she asked.

  *

  It was after the lunchtime break that Miller returned to the office. Simon Wiesenthal had in front of him a number of sheets spread out, extracts from his own Roschmann file. Miller settled himself in front of the desk, got out his notebook and waited.

  Simon Wiesenthal began to relate the Roschmann story from the 8th January 1948.

  It had been agreed between the British and American authorities that after Roschmann had testified at Dachau he would be moved on to the British Zone of Germany, probably Hanover, to await his own trial and almost certain hanging. Even while in prison in Graz he had begun to plan his escape.

  He had made contact with a Nazi escape organisation working in Austria called the ‘Six-point Star’, nothing to do with the Jewish symbol of the six-pointed star, but so called because the Nazi organisation had its tentacles in six major Austrian provincial cities.

  At 6 a.m. on the 8th Roschmann was woken and taken to the train waiting at Graz station. Once in the compartment, an argument started between the Military Police sergeant who wanted to keep the handcuffs on Roschmann throughout the journey and the Field Security sergeant who suggested taking them off.

  Roschmann influenced the argument by claiming that he had diarrhoea from the prison diet and wished to go to the lavatory. He was taken, the handcuffs removed and one of the sergeants waited outside the door until he had finished. As the train chugged through the snowbound landscape Roschmann made three requests to go to the lavatory. Apparently during this time he prised the window in the lavatory open, so that it slid easily on its runners.

  Roschmann knew he had to get out before the Americans took him over at Salzburg for the last run by car to their own prison at Munich, but station after station went by and still the train was going too fast. It stopped at Hallein, and one of the sergeants went to buy some food on the platform. Roschmann again said he wanted to go the lavatory. It was the more easy-going FSS sergeant who accompanied him, warning him not to use the toilet while the train was stationary. As the train moved slowly out of Hallein Roschmann jumped from the window into the snowdrifts. It was ten minutes before the sergeants beat down the door, and by then the train was running fast down the mountains towards Salzburg.

  Police inquiries later established that he staggered through the snow as far as a peasant’s cottage and took refuge there. The following day he crossed the border from Upper Austria into Salzburg province and contacted the Six-point Star organisation. They brought him to a brick factory, where he passed as a labourer, while contact was made with the Odessa for a passage to the south of Italy.

  At that time the Odessa was in close contact with the recruitment section of the French Foreign Legion, into which scores of former SS soldiers had fled. Four days after contact was made, a car with French number plates was waiting outside the village of Ostermieting, and took on board Roschmann and five other Nazi escapers. The Foreign Legion driver, equipped with papers that enabled the car to cross borders without being searched, brought the six SS men over the Italian border to Merano, being paid in cash by the Odessa representative there, a hefty sum per head of his passengers.

  From Merano, Roschmann was taken down to an internment camp at Rimini. Here, in the camp hospital, he had the five toes of his right foot amputated, for they were rotten with frostbite he had picked up while wandering through the snow after escaping from the train. Since then he had worn an orthopaedic shoe.

  His wife in Graz got a letter from him in October 1948 from the camp at Rimini. For the first time he used the new name he had been given. Fritz Bernd Wegener.

  Shortly afterwards he was transferred to the Franciscan monastery in Rome, and when his papers were finalised he set sail from the harbour at Naples for Buenos Aires. Throughout his stay at the monastery in the Via Sicilia he had been among scores of comrades of the SS and the Nazi party, and under the personal supervision of Bishop Alois Hudal, who ensured that they lacked for nothing.

  In the Argentinian capital he was received by the Odessa and lodged with a German family called Vidmar in the Calle Hippolito Irigoyen. Here he lived for months in a furnished room. Early in 1949 he was advanced the sum of 50,000 American dollars out of the Bormann funds, and went into business as an exporter of South American hardwood timber to Western Europe. The firm was called Stemmler and Wegener, for his false papers from the Vatican in Rome firmly established him as Fritz Bernd Wegener, born in the South Tyrol province of Italy.

  He also engaged a German girl as his secretary, Irmtraud Sigrid Müller, and in early 1955 he married her, despite already having his first wife Hella living in Graz. In the spring of 1955 Eva Peron, wife of the dictator of Argentina and the power behind the throne, died of cancer. The writing was on the wall for the Peron regime, and Roschmann spotted it. If Peron fell, much of the protection accorded by him to ex-Nazis might be removed by his successors. With his new wife Roschmann left for Egypt.

  He spent three months there in the summer of 1955, and came to West Germany in the autumn. Nobody would have known a thing but for the anger of a woman betrayed. His first wife, Hella Roschmann, wrote to him from Graz, care of the Vidmar family in Buenos Aires during that summer. The Vidmars, having no forwarding address for their former lodger, opened the letter and replied to the wife in Graz, telling her that he had gone back to Germany, but had married his secretary.

  His wife then informed the police of his new identity. In consequence, the police started a search for Roschmann on a matter of bigamy. Immediately a look-out was posted for a man calling himself Fritz Bernd Wegener in West Germany.

  ‘Did they get him? asked Miller.

  Wiesenthal looked up and shook his head.

  ‘No, he disappeared again. Almost certainly under a new set of false papers, and almost certainly in Germany. You see, that’s why I believe Tauber could have seen him. It all fits with the known facts.’

  ‘Where’s the first wife, Hella Roschmann?’ asked Miller.

  ‘She still lives in Graz.’

  ‘Is it worth contacting her?’

  Wiesenthal shook his head.

  ‘I doubt it. Needless to say, after being “blown” Roschmann is not likely to reveal his whereabouts to her again. Or his new name. For him it must have been quite an emergency when his identity of Wegener was exposed. He must have acquired his new papers in a devil of a hurry.’

  ‘Who would have got them for him?’ asked Miller.

  ‘The Odessa, certainly.’

  ‘Just what is the Odessa? You’ve mentioned it several times in the course of the Roschmann story.’

  ‘You’ve never heard of them?’ asked Wiesenthal.

  ‘No. Not until now.’

  Simon Wiesenthal g
lanced at his watch.

  ‘You’d better come back in the morning. I’ll tell you all about them.’

  Chapter Nine

  PETER MILLER RETURNED TO Simon Wiesenthal’s office the following morning.

  ‘You promised to tell me about the Odessa,’ he said. ‘I remembered something overnight that I forgot to tell you yesterday.’

  He recounted the incident of Dr Schmidt who had accosted him at the Dreesen Hotel and warned him off the Roschmann inquiry.

  Wiesenthal pursed his lips and nodded.

  ‘You’re up against them, all right,’ he said. ‘It’s most unusual for them to take such a step as to warn a reporter in that way, particularly at such an early stage. I wonder what Roschmann is up to that could be so important.’

  Then for two hours the Nazi-hunter told Miller about the Odessa, from its start as an organisation for getting wanted SS criminals to a place of safety to its development into an all-embracing freemasonry among those who had once worn the black-and-silver collars, their aiders and abettors.

  When the Allies stormed into Germany in 1945 and found the concentration camps with their hideous contents, they not unnaturally rounded on the German people to demand who had carried out the atrocities. The answer was ‘The SS’ – but the SS were nowhere to be found.

  Where had they gone? They had either gone underground inside Germany and Austria, or fled abroad. In both cases their disappearance was no spur-of-the-moment flight. What the Allies failed to realise until much later was that each had meticulously prepared his disappearance beforehand.

  It casts an interesting light on the so-called patriotism of the SS that, starting at the top with Heinrich Himmler, each tried to save his own skin at the expense of massive sufferings inevitably inflicted on the German people. As early as November 1944 Heinrich Himmler tried to negotiate his own safe conduct through the offices of Count Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross. The Allies refused to consider letting him off the hook. While the Nazis and the SS screamed at the German people to fight on until the wonder weapons waiting round the corner were delivered, they themselves prepared for their departure to a comfortable exile somewhere. They at least knew there were no wonder weapons, the destruction of the Reich and, if Hitler had anything to do with it, of the entire German nation, was inevitable.